Transmit beamforming (sometimes referred to as transmit adaptive array (TXAA) transmission) increases the effective signal-to-noise seen by a receiver device by creating a coverage pattern that tends to be directional in nature (i.e., not uniformly broadcast). This is accomplished by employing multiple antennas at the transmit site and weighting each antenna such that the combined transmissions result in a beamformed pattern that delivers maximum power/energy to the receiver. In the case of simultaneously transmitting multiple streams to multiple receivers (i.e., transmit spatial division multiple access or SDMA), the antenna weights are chosen so that a minimum amount of crosstalk or interference between users is achieved.
However, forcing all crosstalk to a minimum is restrictive. By allowing tolerable amounts of cross talk, the coherent gain to the desired SDMA user can be increased, and thus the overall performance improved. Thus, choosing antenna weights that minimizes crosstalk between users may result in the best theoretical performance of the communication system at very high SNRs; however, having some crosstalk will be acceptable because this will be buried in the channel noise. Thus, forcing the antenna weights to deliver a minimum amount of crosstalk is unnecessary since a low amount of crosstalk will be buried in the channel noise and therefore will not degrade performance. Therefore, a need exists for a method and apparatus for performing stream weighting in a spatial-division multiple access communication system that allows for some crosstalk between users.